Introduction

Scheme 48 is an implementation of the Scheme programming language as
described in the Revised5 Report on the Algorithmic Language
Scheme [6].
It is based on a compiler and interpreter for a virtual Scheme
machine. Scheme 48 tries to be faithful to the Revised5 Scheme
Report, providing neither more nor less in the initial user
environment. (This is not to say that more isn't available in other
environments; see below.) Support for numbers is weak: bignums are
slow and floating point is almost nonexistent (see description of
floatnums, below).

Scheme 48 is under continual development.
Please report bugs, especially in the VM, especially core dumps, to
scheme-48-bugs@zurich.ai.mit.edu. Include the version number x.yy
from the "Welcome to Scheme 48 x.yy" greeting message in your bug
report. It is a goal of this project to produce a bullet-proof
system; we want no bugs and, especially, no crashes. (There are a few
known bugs, listed in the doc/todo.txt file that comes with the
distribution.)

Send mail to scheme-48-request@zurich.ai.mit.edu to be put on a
mailing list for announcements, discussion, bug reports, and bug
fixes.

The name `Scheme 48' commemorates our having written the original version
in forty-eight hours, on August 6th and 7th, 1986.